Blonde Bombshell, by Tom Holt
On a planet where a dog’s best friend is his man, the director of the Institute for Interstellar Exploration is taking Spot for a walk.
Tom Holt is truly a master at subverting the normal and with Blonde Bombshell he has unleashed yet another deliciously twisted comic incendiary on the science fiction loving population. On the canine dominated planet of Ostar the peace and quiet so enjoyed by the citizenry is being shattered by the appalling attempts at music being belched out by the primitive human inhabitants of the nearby planet affectionately known as Earth. As much as the citizens of Ostar love their own humans – they buy them shiny collars and little jackets and could almost swear that their lovable pets can read their minds – something most be done to quieten to dim, country cousin style humans that have been left to run wild on Earth.
Being a technologically advanced bunch, the Ostar canines created a smart bomb that could be fitted snugly into a missile and launched towards their noisy neighbours, the intention of course being to blow the Earth into billions upon billions of tiny, soundless particles. The bomb is perfect, as well as being immensely powerful it features the most highly developed artificial intelligence system ever created. As the missile is sent speeding off towards its apocalyptic destiny, it seems that the Earth doesn’t stand a chance. Two years pass.
Frontline Afghanistan: The Devil’s Playground, by Mark Ryan
Given the contentious nature of writing a book about a war that is still being fought, it is brave indeed to throw yourself twice into this particular arena. Mike Ryan has done exactly that, evidently confident in his background on the subject – Ryan is the author of seventeen books prior to this one, including the previous History Press publication Battlefield Afghanistan, and has made various documentaries on weapons of warfare and current affairs. His bio also points to time served in UK Reserve forces and references television appearances as a Defence Analyst.
All of which implies a better-than-fair understanding of modern conflict, but this knowledge does not seem to be reflected in Frontline Afghanistan. Indeed, Ryan makes much of emphasising the points he made in Battlefield Afghanistan, especially when more recent events have proved his conclusions correct, which unfortunately comes across to a reader more as self-congratulation than constructive progression of an argument.
War Games, by Linda Polman
When the dust has settled after a natural disaster, or some tenuous respite reached in the chaos of a violent conflict, and a newsreader calmly announces that humanitarian aid is on route to the affected regions, the casual observer usually assumes the worst is over, help is on the way. As international journalist Linda Polman asserts in her new book War Games, this is wildly, horrifically inaccurate.
With devastating simplicity, Polman details how, and to what extent, ruthless warring parties exploit aid agencies for their own gain. Over and over again, perpetrators of genocide and civil unrest lure Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO’s) into their country by generating publicity for refugees (often hiring professional PR agencies to do it for them). They then take the aid agencies for all they’re worth, levying enormous taxes on transit and currency exchange, hijacking supplies and selling them for a profit, siphoning off the donor cash flow and forcing agencies to employ their members on massively disproportionate salaries. In addition to racketeering, they also harness aid activity for more sinister purposes, such as using it to gather a large number of refugees in one area where they can then be massacred. Polman’s overriding concern is just how responsible aid agencies are for their part in human suffering, when they doggedly persist in assisting corrupt and murderous regimes in order that no victim is ignored.
The Orphaned Worlds, by Michael Cobley
So Michael Cobley picks up where Seeds of Earth left off, continuing the story of humanity among the stars. This book certainly is, as the jacket blurb from Iain M. Banks proclaims, “galaxy-spanning”, and this reviewer confesses that it took a while to get in to the swing of thing, picking up numerous plot-lines and characters over a year since reading the first volume being an act that requires better recall than I possess. As a digression, it’s interesting that some authors of series in the SF&F genres provide a precis of what’s gone before, and others don’t, seemingly as a matter of principle – and Orphaned Worlds, however good it is (and it is very good) would definitely have benefited.
While the first book focused mostly on the action on the human colony of Darien, ‘lost’ to galactic civilisation for a long time before its discovery by the Sendrukan Hegemony, The Orphaned Worlds casts its net far wider, properly encompassing for the first time the fate of all three human colony ships that were launched to ensure the survival of humanity during the Swarm Wars. As well as the inhabitants of Darien, now locked in to an unequal struggle with the Sendrukan and Brolturan aliens who came proclaiming friendship, there are the Tygrans, a martial society of humans used as elite commandos by the Sendrukans, but whose history may not be all it appears to be, and the Asiatic peoples of Pilot Kao Chih, imprisoned and enslaved by alien overlords.
The Owl Killers, by Karen Maitland
England, 1321. The tiny, isolated Norfolk village of Ulewic is the setting for an epic battle between knowledge and superstition, ancient beliefs and modern understanding, Gods and demons. The peasants of Ulewic have lived under a cloud of fear for generations as their lives and livelihoods were presided over by the hardhearted lord of the manor and the malevolent Owl Masters. Cloaked in masks and secrecy, the Owl Masters are a pagan cult that commands loyalty through terror, manipulation and horrifying blood rituals. The arrival of the official Church into Ulewic did little to dim the power of the cult and provided scant comfort to the villagers.
However, the founding of a beguinage on the outskirts of the village causes far greater controversy and ripples of suspicion and dread quickly begin to spread across Ulewic. The beguinage is a self-sufficient religious community of women who wish to practice their faith and seek spiritual understanding beyond that offered by the orthodoxy of the Church. Behind the walls of this sanctuary, women from all walks of life have gathered to live together in peace. Initially treated with suspicion, a grudging understanding is beginning to be formed as the women use their medical skills to help the villagers and try to integrate into daily life in Ulewic. However, after Osmanna, the daughter of the lord of the manor who has been cast out of her home, is given shelter in the beguinage, the villager’s crops begin to fail and plague sweeps through Ulewic. These calamities bring to a head all of the rumours, envy and hatred towards the women that have been bubbling away under the deceptively peaceable facade of the village.
The Owl Masters are quick to cry ‘Witchcraft’ and sharpen their talons. As torment and hellfire rain down, the women must look to their faith to save them from the darkness spreading across the land.
Gary McMahon: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
In the second in the series of Bury Me With…, I asked scary Gary McMahon about the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
“I had to think about this one for a long time, and two or three books immediately demanded my attention – books that had a profound effect on my entire life when I first read them. Alan Garner’s Elidor, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But in the end, I went back to the first book I thought of when I saw the question:
Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson.
Johnson’s book consists of a bunch of episodic short stories, all narrated by the same character – a nameless junkie in 1970s America. The stories chart his drug addiction and his ennui, but they also show us so much more about the character and the people around him. The narrator’s voice has a fragile poetic quality, but there’s also a grinding realism to the descriptions of the world he moves through.
There’s beauty here, and pain, and even transcendence. The spirituality of the book has little to do with God or religion, but provides striking insights regarding humanity in all its shattered glory. Everyone the narrator meets is as broken as him, and rather than wallow in self-pity he is overcome with the melancholy beauty of the human condition. His observations and insights are tender and life-affirming, yet he is a true lost soul. When he tells us “I knew every raindrop by its name”, we believe him, and we feel his sense of awe as he says it.
If you’ve never read this book before, do yourself a favour and track it down. My own copy is never far from hand. I’ve only ever read it all the way through once, but I dip into it often, licking the frost off the dream (to steal and abuse a line from Charles Bukowski).
Jesus’ Son is a masterpiece: it’s a book that reminds me what it is to be human.”
More information on Denis Johnson can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Gary McMahon:
Gary McMahon’s fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.K. and U.S and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, How to Make Monsters, Rain Dogs, Different Skins, Pieces of Midnight, Hungry Hearts, and has edited an anthology of original novelettes titled We Fade to Grey.
Angry Robot/HarperCollins will publish the novels Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things in 2010 and 2011. The Concrete Grove trilogy will be published by Solaris Books from 2011 onwards.
- Visit Gary’s website
Win a copy of Tome of the Undergates [closed]
Competition time again here on Bookgeeks, and this time it’s our friends at Gollancz who have stepped up to provide the prize – five copies of Sam Sykes’ Tome of the Undergates – the start of a great new fantasy series.
Lenk can barely keep control of his mismatched adventurer band at the best of times (Gariath the dragon man sees humans as little more than prey, Kataria the shict despises most humans and the humans in the band are little better). When they’re not insulting each other’s religions they’re arguing about pay and conditions. So when the ship they are travelling on is attacked by pirates things don’t go very well. They go a whole lot worse when an invincible demon joins the fray. The demon steals the Tome of the Undergates – a manuscript that contains all you need to open the undergates. And whichever god you believe in you don’t want the undergates open. On the other side are countless more invincible demons, the manifestation of all the evil of the gods, and they want out. Full of razor-sharp wit, characters who leap off the page (and into trouble) and plunging the reader into a vivid world of adventure this is a fantasy that kicks off a series that could dominate the second decade of the century.
Bookgeeks’ Simon Appleby is reading this book at the moment, so expect a review very soon, but in the meantime, if you want to win a copy so you can make your own mind up, answer the following question correctly.
Farlander, by Col Buchanan
An enjoyable fantasy debut from Col Buchanan, Farlander is the first book in the ‘The Heart of the World’ series (a trilogy, perhaps?), and a very impressive debut effort it is too. Very much ‘low fantasy’ in that there are no non-humans to be seen, and precious little magic, Buchanan’s book is reminiscent of K.J.Parker for being largely focused on what humans do to one another in an imagined setting. There are shades of the Roman Empire in the brutal religious dictatorship of Mann, and lashings of technologies not typically found in fantasy (firearms and airships to name two), all of which combine to make this a pleasingly different book.
Ash is an aging and ailing member of the Roshun, an order of elite assassins – they are not for hire per se, but they provide those who can afford it with the ultimate kind of insurance. In the only magic of this world that we really see, the death of a client becomes instantly known to the Roshun by means of a special seal, and they pronounce vendetta on the killer. When Kirkus, the son of the leader of the Mannian Empire, kills a seal holder as part of the ritual sex and violence that is an important part of the Mannian ‘religion’, the Roshun are on the case, knowing the risks of taking on a hugely powerful empire.
Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics, by Jonathan Wilson
Over the last few years there has been a steady rise in the number of books about football. The list of authors is no longer confined to dilettante, arriviste, wanky media luvvies and fanboy geeks but is instead open to those who simply take the subject seriously without patronising or playing to the lowest common denominator. This is officially A Good Thing because most newspapers, television and radio stations still don’t.
Pete Davies’ Italia 90 book All Played Out started this pot boiling, which is now kept bubbling nicely along by dozens of books and a million blogs, each owing much to Davies and to the success of the better 90s fanzines. So successful has this been that a generation has now grown up unembarrassed about discussing football as a game of sophisticated strategy and not simply as an abiding neanderthal passion. This ever growing coterie of writers and broadcasters, including Tim Vickery, Sid Lowe, Guilleme Balague, Gabriel Marcotti, Raphael Honigstein, even dear old Danny Kelly, are genuinely insightful and owe precisely nothing to how football is reported in the press nor much to how it is broadcast on radio and television.
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman
This may well be one of the more anticipated books of the year, from an author who has, along with Richard Dawkins, done much to make it OK to be openly atheistic, or anti-religious, thanks to the strong anti-Church sentiments that reside at the heart of his fantastic His Dark Materials trilogy. In the latest instalment in Canongate’s Myths series (in which Michel Faber has already tackled the subject of Jesus in The Fire Gospel), Pullman has, as the title suggests, come up with a cunning ruse for explaining the perceived dichotomy between the relaxed, love-thy-neighbour preachings of Jesus, and the dogma, cant and rigmarole of the organised Christian churches of the world (most especially, you sense, the Catholic faith): Jesus had a twin brother, and his mother named him Christ.
In Pullman’s vision, Jesus leads a normal childhood before taking to the life of a wandering preacher, inspired by John the Baptist; as he gathers his disciples and begins to draw a following, his twin, Christ, is lurking in the crowds, writing down Jesus’s teachings and modifying them to make them in some way truer, encouraged by a mysterious stranger who may be Satan or an angel, we’re not sure. Essentially, then, it is Christ who corrupts the simply purity of Jesus’s teachings in such a way that ordinary events are perceived as miracles, and that they can be used as the foundation stones of organised Christianity. Christ also takes the Judas Iscariot role in the Gospel story, as well as enabling the ultimate miracle, the resurrection, by looking a lot like Jesus and making himself known following the crucifixion.
Lost, by Gregory Maguire
Having achieved great success with his reimagining of both The Wizard of Oz in The Wicked Years series and Cinderella in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, with Lost Gregory Maguire offers a ghost story evoking A Christmas Carol with a side order of Ripperology.
Winifred Rudge is a morose and rather prickly American author who has been living for years off the spoils of her bestselling astrology book, The Dark Side of the Zodiac; the fact that she has absolutely no faith in the veracity of astrology apparently not having hampered her ability to convincingly put pen to paper and tell other people what they want to hear. With sales of her book dwindling, Winifred needs a new source of income and so has begun work on a novel about a Wendy Pitzke, a woman on the trail of Jack the Ripper. Not having made great progress on the novel at home in New England, Winifred hops on a plane to old England in the hope of jump-starting her research. She intends to stay at the Hampstead flat of her step-cousin and friend John Comestor but, upon her arrival, she discovers that Comestor has mysteriously vanished, leaving behind no explanation for the two Catholic builders who are trying to build an unauthorized staircase to the roof of the building from his kitchen nor for the strange noises that emanate from the chimney behind the wall where they’re working. Even more mysterious, to Winifred’s mind at least, is the fact that the house used to belong to her great-great grandfather, the man rumoured to be the inspiration for Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge.
The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel
What David Simon did for the American inner city in Homicide and The Corner, David Finkel has done here for the war in Iraq. Good Soldiers is an account of time spent with the American 2-16 infantry battalion, known as the Rangers, and is by turns enthralling and depressing. The Rangers, under their commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, were deployed to Baghdad as part of George W. Bush’s famous ‘Surge’, the ramping up of troop numbers designed to pacify the city and pave the way for America’s eventual withdrawal, and during the course of a 12-month deployment (actually extended to 15 months due to troop shortages), they lost 15 of their number. David Finkel was there to record what happened, living with them, patrolling with them, and taking risks with them.
Finkel brings to life the daily grind of soldiering in one of the poorest parts of Baghdad – ensconced in a Forward Operating Base, shelled or rocketed almost every night, and only venturing out in force, the Rangers would be forgiven for thinking that they were beset on all sides – yet some of them come to understand that there are good citizens outside the wire too, who have to co-exist with the insurgents when the Americans withdraw after their sweeps, patrols and intelligence gathering. The greatest risk to the soldiers is from Improvised Explosive Devices, especially those known as Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs), which can rip American vehicles apart, and every journey is fraught with danger – it is in such situations that the 2-16 suffers most of its casualties.
Simon Strantzas: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
In the first of what will be a regular series, I’ve asked genre authors about the book that has influenced them more than any, the book they’d like to take with them to their grave… first up is Canadian author and tundra-spook Simon Strantzas:
“The book I would like to be buried with is such an obvious selection for me that it hardly seems worth the effort to explain. Anyone familiar with my writing might guess the answer, but for those in the dark I suspect I’d most like to be buried with The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman. Aickman didn’t write a lot of fiction over his lifetime, but what he did write continues to fascinate and befuddle those of us who enjoy his work. He dealt with dreamscapes, with symbols and metaphors, and while many of his tales lack a clear explanation for what exactly has occurred in them, they are often like the best of our dreams – at times illogical, yet always adhering to their own internal logic.
Reading Aickman one can’t help but feel that it’s the reader, not the author, who is at fault if things aren’t clear – the tales make sense, one can feel that they do, even if how remains frustratingly elusive. To study these ciphers, to tease out their true meanings, would take eternity, and I suspect, trapped in that coffin beneath the ground, I’d have nothing more to do than put my mind to it once and for all. Imagine: to be the only corpse in the yard who understood Aickman… I wager I’d be the belle of the undead ball that year.”
The first two volume edition of The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman was published by Tartarus Press and Durtro Press in 1999 and is now out of print, but available through several specialist dealers.
More informaton about Robert Aickman can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Simon Strantzas:
Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically-acclaimed Cold To The Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), a collection of thirteen tales of the strange and supernatural. His first collection, Beneath The Surface (Humdrumming, 2008) was called “possibly the most important debut short story collection in the genre [in years]. . .” by multiple award-winning editor Stephen Jones. Strantzas’s stories have appeared or are due soon in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, and elsewhere. In 2009, his work was nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Current projects include a third collection of short fiction, a novella, and a short novel. He also hopes to one day catch up on a voluminous amount of reading.
He has lived in Toronto, Canada, for his entire life and has no plans on leaving for sunnier climes.
P.C. Hodgell
P. C. Hodgell is the author of the God Stalker series currently being reissued by Baen: God Stalk and Dark of the Moon in the omnibus The God-Stalker Chronicles; Seeker’s Mask and To Ride a Rathorn in Seeker’s Bane. The fifth in the series, Bound in Blood, was recently released. Pat lives, teaches, knits, and falls off horses in Wisconsin.
Dark Life, by Kat Falls
Kat Falls has done an astonishing job with her debut novel, Dark Life. From the fantastic and compelling setting, to the endearing and complete characters, to the vision of a future that manages to be both apocalyptic and hopeful, Dark Life is a fascinating combination of thriller, future-projection, and young adult coming of age story.
It all begins with a teenage boy, exploring and out for adventure:
I peered into the deep-sea canyon, hoping to spot a toppled skyscraper. Maybe even the Statue of Liberty. But there was no sign of the old East Coast, just a sheer drop into darkness.
And, with that, Kat Falls plunges the reader directly into a new world. The world as we know it is gone, drowned under rising seas, and people now live stacked one on the other in crowded high rises on the little land left or, if they are brave, or desperate, enough, they farm the sea beds and pioneer a new life under the ocean. Ty’s family was one of the first. His mother and father helped research and design the buildings, farms, and life he now lives, but there is one thing they didn’t plan for, something that Ty has kept a secret for fear that it would drive him from the undersea world he loves.
White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi
When The Icarus Girl, her debut novel, was released, Helen Oyeyemi had just turned twenty and, having written her book in secret when she should have been studying for her A-levels, was hailed as a literary prodigy. The Icarus Girl, a novel about a girl growing up between cultures and colours, was a commercial as well as critical success and left readers anxious to see whether Oyeyemi could maintain such a level of invention and entrancing use of language in her future works. White is for Witching is Oyeyemi’s third novel and her most thematically complex work to date. Expanding on the gothic themes first considered by Oyeyemi in The Icarus Girl and in her second book The Opposite House, White is for Witching is an ambitious novel concerning witchcraft, malevolent spirits which can lurk in the most unexpected of places and the depths of insanity which can infest a young woman and plague her family.
As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes sufferers to consume inedible substances. Following the death of her mother when she is just sixteen, Miranda’s condition worsens and leaves her with an insatiable hunger for chalk. This is just one of the problems that Miranda must overcome as she settles into life in the family home with just herself, her twin brother Eliot and her devastated father Luc. Perched high on the cliffs near Dover, the house had been in the possession of her mother’s ancestors for generations and, to Miranda at least, it seems to display a capricious dislike for change as well as outsiders. Converted into a bed-and-breakfast by Miranda’s father, the house seems to manifest a conscious malice towards strangers and quickly dispatches visitors who it despises. Enraged by the near constant stream of guests and new staff, the house becomes fiercely possessive of Miranda and, finally, unleashes its most destructive power.
Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann
David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide begins not with a death, but with those left behind:
My mother and I survived. Not having taken off to any heights, we had nowhere to fall. We drank clear bouillon soup with a few peas in it after my uncle called and told us the news, and in the evening, as the light in the sky faded to blue and then black, we sat in our living room, in the fluorescent glow of the fish tank, watching.
All of the short stories in this collection (really four short stories and one central novella) revolve around death and the consequences any sort of death or loss can have on those whose lives intersect with it. From the quiet loss of an ex-wife and son, to the desperation of a father, Vann explores facets of grief and sadness. Read more
The Bones of Avalon, by Phil Rickman
Generally speaking, Doctor John Dee has not been remembered fondly by posterity. Born in 1527, John Dee was one of the greatest minds of his generation. Famous during his lifetime as a mathematician, astrologer, astronomer, navigator and occultist, Dee was also a tutor and trusted advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. In fact, the date for her coronation was chosen based on horoscopes cast by Dee. An extremely learned man, Dee straddled the disciplines of magic and science at the time they were finally becoming distinguishable. Although his academic and political achievements were formidable, it is for his belief in spirits and the occult for which Dee is best remembered. Dee believed that he was able to communicate with angels through a scryer (or medium) named Edward Kelley and he produced several books which he claimed had been dictated to him by these angels. Although such a belief in spirits was not particularly outlandish at the time, colleagues and critics of Dee used his occult activities to discredit him and cast doubt on his scientific prowess. Even those who genuinely believed that Dee was communicating with spirits felt that he was being duped by demons rather than conversing with angels.
In popular culture terms, John Dee has cropped up as a character in a huge range of books, films and even songs. As far as his literary appearances go, Dee has appeared as a baddie in Michael Scott’s The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series, has translated the Necronomicon into English in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, and has acted as a guide in Alan Moore’s Promethea series. These are just a few examples of the myriad of interpretations of John Dee that have occurred in literature. Although the stories in which he has featured are vastly different, the great majority of instances in which John Dee has been woven into a story concentrate on Dee’s occult practices and supernatural investigations. They concentrate on Dee as a caricature of himself rather than on the real man. With The Bones of Avalon, Phil Rickman has taken a different approach and has created a John Dee character that stays true to the real Dee’s mild, bookish nature. Rickman’s John Dee is a regular, if highly intelligent, man of his times who uses his learning as well as his beliefs to aid Queen and country.
The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann
The Affinity Bridge is George Mann’s first novel in the Newbury and Hobbes Investigations series. In it we are introduced to Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator for the Crown, Miss Veronica Hobbes, his intrepid assistant, and the fascinating and smokey version of London and life that Mann so cleverly creates. The rattling, smokey, and steam-powered atmosphere that surrounds Newbury and Hobbes is as important a character as the two detectives, and the first glimpse of Queen Victoria is worth the price of admission all on its own.
This novel begins with the terrifying death of three soldiers stationed in India:
The creature that was menacing Taylor was like something raised from the very depths of Hades itself. It was dressed in the torn rags of an Indian peasant, and may have once been human, but now looked more like a half-rotted corpse than anything resembling a man. The creature’s skin was desiccated and peeling, its eyes bloodshot, its hair hanging in loose, stringy strands around its face.
These diseased humans, called revenants by those in London unlucky enough to learn of their existence, carry a deadly virus, one capable of turning a man into a monster. And these monsters are stalking the poor and defenseless in London, infecting more victims every evening while hidden in the fog and smog that hang heavy over the city. Those who don’t fall victim to the virus and disappear cower in their houses after dark, and thus miss some of the things that are an even greater danger to those who would walk freely in the city. Read more
Blood Ninja, by Nick Lake
Ninjas. Vampires. Put them together and what have you got? Pure fantasy gold, it would appear. For many people, the combination of these two tropes, even without the ongoing Stephanie Meyer-induced vampire-mania, would be enough to get them to buy Blood Ninja, whatever the reviews say, but there’s an added bonus: this is really a very well written book, and hugely entertaining.
Taro has been raised as a fishermen by his poor family, but it would appear fate has something else in store for him: when his family is set upon by a crew of black-clad assassins, only the appearance of another ninja saves Taro and his friend Hiro from a brutal end to their young lives – and once on the run, there is no going back. Their rescuer, the Ninja Shukasu, must get them to safety with his clan – and Taro and Hiro have much to learn about what it is to be a njina and a vampire: like classic vampires, they can be killed by light but are almost invulnerable to most harm, a case of their profession and their physical characteristics being an almost perfect match.
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
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Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
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